EJIL: In this Issue (Vol. 28 (2017) No. 3)

This issue opens with three articles addressing trade and investment in international law from different perspectives. In a valuable and timely contribution to the literature on the interpretation of investment treaties, Andrew Mitchell and James Munro consider whether the use of a third-party agreement in interpretation constitutes an erroneous application of the customary rules of treaty interpretation in the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. Gracia Marín Durán then explores the respective responsibility of the European Union and its member states for the performance of World Trade Organization obligations, proposing a ‘competence/remedy’ model to help untangle this delicate question. And Sergio Puig and Anton Strezhnev investigate the legitimacy of international investment law, based on an experimental survey of 266 international arbitrators, concluding that there is strong evidence that arbitrators may be prone to the ‘David Effect’ – a relative bias to favour the perceived underdog or ‘weaker’ party when that party wins, through reimbursement of their legal costs.

The next set of articles in this issue focuses on human rights, with particular attention to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). Merris Amos examines the continued value of the ECtHR to the United Kingdom, illustrating what might happen if the UK were to withdraw from the Court. Susana Sanz-Caballero investigates the scope of applicability of the nulla poena sine lege principle before the ECtHR, looking especially at the decisions in Kafkaris and del Río Prada to highlight the Court’s increasingly flexible approach to the concepts of penalty, foreseeability and enforcement of penalty. Oddný Arnardóttir argues that the Court has effectively used the margin of appreciation to engender an erga omnes effect for its judgments through the principle of res interpretata. Vera Shikhelman offers a fresh, empirical look at the work of the United Nations Human Rights Committee, exploring whether geographical, political and cultural considerations correlate with the voting of committee members. Lastly, Thomas Kleinlein addresses an important development in the ECtHR jurisprudence, positing that the Court’s legitimation strategy – comprising European consensus and the new procedural approach to the margin of appreciation – enhances the potential for democratic contestation and deliberation.

Roaming Charges in this issue takes us to the Negev Desert in southern Israel, where the photographer, Emma Nyhan, poignantly captures the ‘outsideness’ of a cultural minority, the Bedouins.

This issue features a lively EJIL: Debate!, centring on an article by Jonathan Bonnitcha and Robert McCorquodale, which addresses the concept of ‘due diligence’ in the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. The authors criticize the uncertainty caused by two different concepts of due diligence invoked by the principles and suggest an interpretation of the Guiding Principles that clarifies the relationship between these concepts. John Ruggie (the author of the Guiding Principles) and John F Sherman, III, respond to the article, questioning the interpretive approach adopted by Bonnitcha and McCorquodale. The authors then offer a rejoinder.

This issue inaugurates a new rubric for the Journal, A Fresh Look at Old Cases. In the first entry under this rubric, William Phelan uses the writings of French judge Robert Lecourt to show how the legal philosophy he developed before his appointment to the European Court of Justice connects with the fundamental doctrines elaborated by the Court after his appointment. This discovery highlights what the Court was attempting to achieve in its ‘legal revolution’ of 1963-1964 and enhances our understanding of the EU’s essential organizing principles.

The articles section of the issue closes with a Critical Review of International Governance by Ekaterina Yahyaoui Krivenko who examines the jus cogens jurisprudence of the International Court of Justice as a means to analyse and appraise the potential for using feminist methods in the Court’s reasoning.

The Last Page poem in this issue, by Günter Wilms, was inspired by Georges Moustaki’s song ‘Sarah’ and presents a personal vision, both melancholic and euphoric, of the European Union 30 years after the Single European Act and 60 years after the signature of the Treaties of Rome.